The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

Since Congress, which appears to have a disproportionate number of genocidal maniacs in its ranks, is all right with the Palestinians being subjected to mass murder, it should come as no surprise that they are all right with their remaining unfree from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

As often has been the case in American history, the House of Representatives has failed to understand its role in the Constitution. The representatives might like to consult their own website, which notes that the First Amendment says,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The resolution passed Wednesday is a blatant attempt to abridge the freedom of speech. That is why it is a resolution and not incorporated into a law, because the law would be struck down immediately. As for the resolution, it is hateful hot air.

The resolution alleges that the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is “antisemitic.” They seem to be worse readers of texts even than they are constitutional scholars. The phrase doesn’t mention Jews. It says that Palestine will be free.

Palestine is currently not free.

However, on 13 December, 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher signed the Oslo Peace Accords. These accords, which have the force of U.S. law, specified that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank by 1997 and turn their governance over to the Palestine Authority, that is, the state of Palestine. Had the Oslo accords been implemented, then from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine would have been free.

They were not implemented because the accords were deliberately derailed by the far right wing Likud Party led by Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu boasted about his role in ensuring that Palestine did not become free. The Likud wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population (which the New York Times is forbidden to tell you).

Video: “Netanyahu boasting about Manipulating America and derailing Oslo peace process”

So the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” can be read as an insistence that Oslo, which is US treaty law, actually be implemented.

The congressional resolution insists that the phrase must mean that the state of Palestine would constitute all the land of historic Palestine, i.e. the area of the British Mandate of Palestine. In such a scenario, there would be no place for Israel.

However, in those Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, signed by the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, that organization agreed to recognize Israel.

So supporters of the PLO and of the state of Palestine obviously do not mean by the chant to take back away that recognition. In fact, the ones who reneged are the Israelis, who took back away their recognition of Palestine.

It may be that some people who use the phrase “from the river to the sea” mean it in an anti-Israel fashion. That it always has this sense is not something that members Congress, most of whom are signally ignorant of the Middle East, can stipulate. If we stop letting Congress play ventriloquist with Palestinians, and listen to actual Palestinians, what do we hear?

Yusuf Munayyer wrote in Jewish Currents, “I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote, “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

MSNBC: “Rep. Rashida Tlaib responds to House censure vote”

Congress complains that the phrase seeks to deprive the Jewish people of the right of self-determination. But the Jewish people in the sense of followers of the Judaic religion are not a national unit. American Jews are Americans. If Congress is saying that all Jews everywhere have the right of collective self-determination and that it can only be exercised in historic Palestine, then it is saying that the 6 million American Jews are deprived of that right. The resolution reduces American Jews to second-class citizens in the US. What could be more antisemitic than this resolution?

The statement is not about the Judaic religion but about the political doctrines of Zionism, which Congress is attempting to impose on us all. Moreover, the perspective adopted in the congressional resolution is not that of garden variety Zionism but that of the most extreme, fascistic forms of the ideology, which rule out a Palestinian state and any basic human rights for the 14 million Palestinians, who surely have as much right to collective self-determination as the 16 million Jews.

In contrast, the Mandatory authority in British Palestine, given that charge by the Versailles Peace Conference and its San Remo satellite conference after World War I, in its last official pronouncement of London’s vision of the future, the 1939 White Paper, said:

“The objective of His Majesty’s Government is the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State in such treaty relations with the United Kingdom as will provide satisfactorily for the commercial and strategic requirements of both countries in the future. The proposal for the establishment of the independent State would involve consultation with the Council of the League of Nations with a view to the termination of the Mandate.

The independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”

The mandatory authority envisioned that the Palestinian people in its charge would be no different from the Syrian people under French rule, the Iraqi people under British rule (class A mandates), or the people of French and British [formerly German] Togoland, which were Class B mandates. British Togoland became part of Ghana and French Togoland became the Togolese Republic or Togo. There is today a Syria, an Iraq, a Togo. There is no Palestine. International law was thwarted by hard line Zionists, in the crimes of whom Congress is an accessory after the fact.

The League of Nations and then the United Nations were committed to ending the problem of statelessness and would not have wanted the Palestinians to be colonized forever, and forever to lack collective sovereignty.

Again, this principle was made explicit by the British government:

“His Majesty’s Government are charged as the Mandatory authority “to secure the development of self governing institutions” in Palestine. Apart from this specific obligation, they would regard it as contrary to the whole spirit of the Mandate system that the population of Palestine should remain forever under Mandatory tutelage. It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.”

So the first nation to pledge that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (by 1949!) was the United Kingdom, the mandatory authority to which the League of Nations and then the United Nations forwarded the rule of Palestine. Moreover, its pledges in this regard have continuing force in international law regarding the ultimate disposition of the Palestinian people.

The UN General Assembly partition plan of 1947 was no more than a (remarkably pro-Zionist) suggestion and did not have the force of law. Only the UNSC has executive authority, and that body never adopted the plan. Both the Zionists and the Palestinians rejected it. Some Zionist apologists pretend that David Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders accepted the plan, but then why did they usurp territory such as the Galilee that was not awarded to them? Ben Gurion wrote in his diary when Israel was founded in 1948 that its borders were not specified in the constitution, just as those of the United States had not been in its. He had in mind an expansionist Manifest Destiny, and tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Palestinian Gaza and southern Lebanon, and officials around him plotted to get the West Bank from the late 1950s. Does that sound like he accepted the UNGA map?

Moreover, the Palestinian rejection of the UNGA proposal is no grounds for forever denying them the right to citizenship in a state, which is denied to no other people in the world. That is, there are peoples who chafe at the citizenship they have, such as Syrian Kurds, but there is no other group of several million people who have been kept stateless for many decades the way the Palestinians have been.

An end to this statelessness is one of the things that is meant by “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Congress has repeatedly obstructed any attempt to end Palestinian statelessness or to realize the vision of even the British colonialists, supercilious and racist as they were. Congress is clearly much more so. “It is proper,” British officials maintained, “that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.” “As early as possible” was not envisioned in 1939 as some date after 2024.

Israel’s total war on Gaza, following Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, has roiled higher education in the United States. The atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel two months ago have reverberated on many U.S. campuses, deeply traumatizing many Jewish students. But so too has Israel’s massive military response in Gaza, which has been equally shocking to Palestinian-American, Arab American and Muslim American students, among many others.

In the heated atmosphere prevailing since then, questions have arisen about the limits to free speech in the classroom, among student and faculty organizations, and on the social media accounts of university members, from professors to administrators. Often, these charged debates reflect the advent of significant numbers of minority students on university campuses, some from the post-1965 immigration wave, who view the Israel-Palestine conflict very differently than the white majority on many campuses, as a recent Gallup poll demonstrates. These controversies also reflect the efforts of special interest groups and outside organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to discipline campus speech and brand some of it as support for terrorism.

Some of these campaigns have attempted to silence Palestinian-Americans and their perspectives outright. In October, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ordered all public universities in the state to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on their campus. The move came after the organization issued a “toolkit” for understanding the context of the Oct. 7 attacks, in which they characterized Hamas as a resistance organization. The SJP insisted that its student members are part of the resistance, not merely in solidarity with it. DeSantis’s order immediately provoked threats of civil lawsuits that would personally name university officials participating in the shutdown. Emma Camp at Reason magazine reported that as a result, the Chancellor of the University of Florida system, Ray Rodrigues, announced that he was backing off any action against SJP, though he did hold out the possibility that the university would require the group to pledge nonviolence and disassociate itself from Hamas. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group, immediately pointed out that that requirement would also be unconstitutional.

Photo by Merch HÜSEY on Unsplash

But that did not stop the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law from taking up DeSantis’s program, writing a letter to university presidents pressuring them to close down SJP chapters on the grounds that the group gave material assistance to terrorism (a charge the letter does not substantiate). Under U.S. law, “material assistance” involves training, expert advice or assistance, service and personnel. Given that the SJP is not hosting training camps for Hamas fighters or actively advising the organization on tactics, the letter is nonsensical and, in a just world, would be found libelous.

I tooled around the news sites reading articles about the resolution, but found that no one reprinted it in full or even quoted liberally from it. So I thought I would offer a commentary on it.

118TH CONGRESS 1 ST SESSION H. RES. 845 Censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES NOVEMBER 6, 2023 Mr. M C CORMICK (for himself, Mr. N EHLS , Mr. I SSA, and Mr. V AN DREW ) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Ethics RESOLUTION Censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

Whereas Israel has existed on its lands for millennia

Israel has not existed on “its lands” for millennia. The indigenous Palestinian people have been living in Palestine, including what is now Israel, for millennia, and you want to erase them from history.

From 1099 when the Christian Crusaders took Jerusalem until the early 20th century there were only a handful of Jews in geographical Palestine, called Filastin in Arabic. When Bonaparte invaded in 1799, he found only 3,000 Jews in a population that probably amounted at that time to some 200,000 people, almost all of them Muslims and Christians. Even before the Crusades, many Jews had converted to Christianity or Islam and others had emigrated as merchants to Europe. There was no independent Jewish polity in geographical Palestine from the Roman conquest in 63 BCE until 1948. Palestine was successively ruled by pagan Rome, by Christian Rome, and then by the Muslim empires. So that is over 2 millennia when Israel had not existed on that land. Dressing up settler colonialism as a revival of some ancient state is typical imperialist diction. The French claimed Algeria on the grounds that it had been ruled by Rome and the French Empire was a successor state to the Roman Empire.

and the United States played a critical role in returning Israel to those lands in 1948 immediately following the Holocaust in recognition of its right to exist and as an indelible signal of our solidarity with the Jewish people;

Most of the world’s 18 million Jews don’t live in Israel and many do not desire to do so. So solidarity with the Israeli government has little to do with solidarity with the Jewish people. What actually happened was that Europe genocided its Jews, with half a million escaping to the British Mandate of Palestine where they were welcomed by British authorities as a pro-British population that offset the hostility of the 1.3 million indigenous, colonized Palestinians. After WW II, instead of repatriating Jews to Europe where they could get restitution for lost property, Europe and the United States dumped the survivors in British Palestine as settler-colonialists. King Abd al-Aziz Bin Saud suggested that the Jews be given, say, Bavaria, instead (just as Poland was given Gdansk [Danzig]), since it was Germany that committed the Holocaust, not the poor Palestinians. No one “returned” Israel to anything.

Whereas Israel is a critical ally to the American people and to our strategic national security interests in the Middle East;

It is not in fact clear what exactly Israel does for US national security interests. Its brutal policies toward Palestinians and Arab neighbors have provoked a lot of anti-US sentiment and even terrorism. It was useless in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. It has refused to join a boycott of Russia over Ukraine or to send substantial weaponry to Ukraine.



Whereas the people of Israel -— including American citizens— were brutally attacked on October 7, 2023, by Hamas;

True, but what has that got to do with Rashida Tlaib? You do understand that tarring all Palestinians with the brush of Hamas or October 7 is an ugly form of racism, don’t you?

Whereas Representative Rashida Tlaib, within 24 hours of the October 7 barbaric attack on Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, representing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, defended the brutal rapes, murders, beheadings, and kidnapping—including of Americans— by Hamas as justified ‘‘resistance’’ to the ‘‘apartheid state’’;

Yeah, you just made that up. It never happened. Israel is practicing Apartheid, and some Palestinians do resist it. But Tlaib has never spoken in favor of terrorism and she explicitly condemned the October 7 attacks. What you are really saying is that you don’t want anyone to bring up the years since 2007 during which Israel has kept Gaza under an economic blockade, denying it an airport or seaport, carefully rationing what materials are allowed in, refusing to let most residents leave for medical treatment, and producing an unemployment rate of 54%. Israel turned Gaza into an open air prison where 10 percent of children are stunted owing to malnutrition, with the complicity of the US Congress. So by all means pledge that we shall not speak of it.

MSNBC: “Rep. Rashida Tlaib responds to House censure vote”

Whereas Representative Tlaib’s October 8 statement claimed that Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish people was partly attributable to United States security aid provided to Israel, which ignores the fact that the Iron Dome, a co-developed air defense system, saved lives that day by intercepting rockets launched from the Gaza Strip against Israeli civilian targets;

Yeah, the US Congress has been spineless in standing against Israel’s predatory behavior toward the Palestinians and has armed Israel to the teeth while allowing it to steal Palestinian land, keep Palestinians stateless, and colonize Palestinian land. Israel has used US weaponry such as cluster bombs in south Lebanon in ways contrary to US law, but you legislators let it get away with murder. The siege of Gaza and the repression in the West Bank are carried out with American weapons. It is possible to condemn this supreme onesidedness on the part of the US Congress and also to condemn Hamas.

Whereas, on October 18, 2023, Representative Tlaib continued to knowingly spread the false narrative that Israel intentionally bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17 after United States intelligence, Israeli intelligence, and President Biden assessed with high confidence that Israel did not cause the explosion;

Tlaib has called for an impartial investigation. But why concentrate only on al-Ahli hospital? The Israeli armed forces by their own admission went on to bomb several other hospitals, including striking the al-Nasser Medical Complex, damaging al-Quds City Hospital and blasting an ambulance, which are war crimes but which Congress refuses to denounce as such. Might these contraventions of the Geneva Conventions warrant a Congressional censure?

Oh, gee. I see that the Senate in fact castigated Russia for its actions in Ukraine, calling them genocide and issuing a condemnation of “killing members of the Ukrainian people in mass atrocities through deliberate and regularized murders of fleeing civilians and civilians in passing as well as purposeful targeting of homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, and other residential and civilian areas…” But apparently some people are white and Christian and bombing their hospitals is genocide, while other people are brown and Muslim and, you know, war is hell.

Whereas, on November 3, 2023, Representative Tlaib published on social media a video containing the phrase ‘‘from the river to the sea’’, which is widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea;

Whereas Representative Tlaib doubled down on this call to violence by falsely describing ‘‘from the river to the sea’’ as ‘‘an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence’’ despite it clearly entailing Israel’s destruction and denial of its fundamental right to exist; and

If Tlaib says that for her the phrase “from the river to the sea” doesn’t imply the destruction of Israel, then I’m not sure why you claim to know better than she what is in her mind.

But note that surely Palestinians ought to be free from the river to the sea, rather than living as stateless chattel under foreign military occupation. Since your predecessors in earlier Congresses supported slavery, Jim Crow, and the Apartheid government in South Africa, though, your body doesn’t have a glorious history of standing for oppressed people, so I understand your confusion when they demand their freedom.

Whereas Representative Tlaib has repeatedly displayed conduct entirely unbecoming of a Member of the House of Representatives by calling for the destruction of the state of Israel and dangerously promoting false narratives regarding a brutal, large-scale terrorist attack against civilian targets inside the sovereign territory of a major non- NATO ally while hundreds of Israeli and American hostages remain in terrorist captivity:

Yeah, again, Rep. Tlaib hasn’t called for the destruction of the state of Israel or promoted any false narratives about the October 7 attack. By the way, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, South Korea, Thailand, and Tunisia are also non-NATO allies.

Do you want to guess what Argentina, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar and Tunisia think about your refusal to call for a ceasefire when indiscriminate Israeli bombing of civilians has killed over 10,000, nearly half of them children? And then, NATO allies France, Spain and Turkey along with NATO applicant Norway all voted for the UNGA resolution for an immediate and durable humanitarian truce in Gaza. Or do you not really care what your allies think?

Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That Representative Rashida Tlaib be censured.

You’ve censured yourself with this farrago of falsehoods and litany of lies, this tissue of tyranny and proclamation of hypocrisy.

More than half of discretionary spending goes to the military. Only a tiny fraction addresses the most urgent threat to our security.

By Lindsay Koshgarian, Alliyah Lusuegro

( Otherwords.org ) – As the hottest summer in human history approached its end, tens of thousands of climate marchers rallied in New York to call for bold climate solutions. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington lurched toward another fight over the federal budget.

More than ever, the U.S. needs to get serious about climate. And to do that, we need to re-prioritize what’s in that budget.

As it stands, more than half of the discretionary budget that Congress allocates each year goes to the Pentagon. Until the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year, the average taxpayer gave $2,375 each year to the military — and just $6 to renewable energy projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act marked the most significant commitment to reducing fossil fuel emissions in U.S. history. But it still falls far short of the need if we are to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change.

Those ravages are already on display. In the United States, summer was a boiling cauldron of heat domes and wildfire smoke and awash with floods and tornadoes — all worsened by climate change. The deadliest wildfire in U.S. history claimed hundreds of lives in Maui.

The rest of the world suffered too.

Normally temperate parts of Europe roasted in the heat. Thousands of people have died and gone missing in Libya, where whole communities were washed into the sea by flooding. At our southern border, migrants escaping climate chaos throughout our hemisphere are seeking refuge only to be preemptively denied an opportunity to apply for asylum — a violation of national and international law.

Climate change is making each of these human disasters deadlier and more frequent.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale and horror of it all. But the U.S. is in a unique position to contribute to solutions. As the wealthiest country in the world, we have the resources and knowledge to lead the way. We also bear the responsibility of having released more fossil fuel emissions over our history than any other country.

Image by G.C. from Pixabay

Unfortunately, our anemic contributions to global climate programs fail to meet either the need or our responsibility for this great threat to world security. Instead, in the name of security, we throw hundreds of billions of dollars every year into war and weapons.

This year, Congress looks likely to approve an $886 billion (or higher) military budget. But debate is nearly absent on increasing global climate aid, which last year totaled just $1 billion.

Worse still, the Pentagon itself is part of the problem. It’s the most carbon intensive institution in the world, responsible for 75 percent of federal government emissions. Boeing’s B-52 Stratofortress, for example, uses as much fuel in an hour as an average car driver consumes in seven years.

And the biggest Pentagon contractors emit even more than the Pentagon itself. Instead of looking for ways to reduce these emissions, some members of Congress are now making efforts to excuse Pentagon contractors from even reporting their emissions — a serious backstep in holding big-time industrial polluters accountable.

There can be no security without climate solutions. For our own safety and the world’s, we can and must do more. It’s time to reorder our federal budget priorities to address this global threat before it boils over any further.

Climate change is the fight of our lifetime. It’s time we spent our money like we knew that.

 

Lindsay Koshgarian, Alliyah Lusuegro

Lindsay Kosgharian directs the National Priorities Project (NPP) at the Institute for Policy Studies. Alliyah Lusuegro is the NPP outreach coordinator.

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