Trump wants $1.5tn for the Pentagon – and cuts to healthcare and housing. The president’s proposed $445bn increase in military spending would batter popular domestic programs as millions struggle

In seeking a mammoth increase in military spending while cutting social programs, Trump is again showing how hollow his promises were about making life better for typical Americans.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Steven Greenhouse

 

 

 

 

 Tue 21 Apr 2026 

With Americans focused on Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war against Iran, far too few Americans are focusing on another disastrous Trump idea: increasing the Pentagon’s budget to a colossal $1.5tn. Just as Trump’s Iran war has hurt millions of Americans by sending gas prices skyward, Trump’s supersized Pentagon budget will hurt millions of Americans because Trump, to help finance that budget, is pushing for painful cuts in health, education, and housing programs.

By proposing a record-breaking $445bn increase in military spending, Trump is showing he’s gung-ho for guns, but not for butter, even though millions of Americans are struggling financially and are eager for more butter – social spending – to make their lives easier. Trump’s proposed military budget would mean a spectacular jump – it would be 42% above this year’s budget and two-thirds bigger than Joe Biden’s last Pentagon budget. Asserting that human needs are woefully underfunded, a coalition of 289 groups denounced Trump’s “gigantic” increase as “grossly irresponsible”, especially since the US already spends more on its military than the next nine biggest defense-spending countries combined.

Trump evidently wants this $445bn increase so he can thump his chest even more about the US’s military might and brag about all the shiny, new hardware he is building, especially the new Trump-class “Golden Fleet” battleships named after you-know-who. (Those battleships will cost an astonishing $9bn to $13bn each.) Beyond that $445bn jump in military spending, let’s not forget that Trump wants Congress to approve a separate $200bn for his not-so-successful war against Iran.

 Trump’s Pentagon spending spree could prove disastrous in several ways. To help fund his increase, Trump is seeking a 10% cut in discretionary domestic spending, chopping such popular programs as medical research, job training, home heating assistance, environmental protection and disaster relief after hurricanes. After all the grievous damage that Trump has already done to government programs, the public doesn’t want more cuts – it wants increased spending on healthcare and other social programs.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/21/trump-military-pentagon-budget  

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

The TWO BILLION DOLLARS a week that Donald Trump was spending on his reckless war in Iran could have funded saving more than 87 million lives, the head of the UN’s humanitarian agency, Tom Fletcher, said on Monday. He also warned the normalisation of violent language, such as threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone ages, was very dangerous since it encourages every “wannabe autocrat” to use similar threats and tactics, including the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure.

The funeral of Mohammad Taha Jafari, who lost his life in the bombing of Shajarat al-Tayyiba Primary School, is held in Minab, Iran, on 30 March 2026. Photograph: Hamid Vakili/Anadolu via Getty Images

US spending on ‘reckless’ Iran war could have saved 87m lives, says UN

Head of UN’s humanitarian agency frustrated that $2bn weekly cost of conflict comes amid big cuts to aid budgets

The $2bn (£1.5bn) a week that Donald Trump was spending on his reckless war in Iran could have funded saving more than 87 million lives, the head of the UN’s humanitarian agency, Tom Fletcher, said on Monday.

He also warned the normalisation of violent language, such as threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone ages, was very dangerous since it encourages every “wannabe autocrat” to use similar threats and tactics, including the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Speaking at Chatham House in London, Fletcher, a former UK diplomat and adviser on foreign policy to successive prime ministers, also accused British politicians of forming a circular firing squad for more than 10 years which has left the UK in a “defensive crouch”.

The scale of the recent UK aid cuts had been so severe that people giggle at conferences where the UK claims to be thought leaders on the subject, he said, before later adding the judgment might seem harsh.

Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator and head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is wrestling with a humanitarian aid funding crisis he described as cataclysmic, amounting to a 50% cut in his budget.

This is driven not just by the US but also by international cuts to overseas aid driven by a mix of ideology and demands from defence budgets.

He said the war in Iran was having a ripple effect across the globe and predicted that, with food and fuel inflation reaching close to 20%, “we will feel the impact for years in sub-Saharan Africa and east Africa pushing way more people into poverty”.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/20/us-spending-on-reckless-iran-war-could-have-saved-87m-lives-says-un

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

"All they will find is sand" Eyal Weizman on the demolition of Gaza in The London Review of Books April 2026

Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026

 Eyal Weizman   

The​ UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems, power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower and more tortuous form of annihilation.

The idea that the built environment determines a group’s conditions of life recalls the modernist conception of architecture, prevalent when the word ‘genocide’ was first conceived and defined by the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Modern architecture offered to calculate and improve the conditions of life. Cities were to be laid out in accordance with public health principles, and homes, in Le Corbusier’s famous definition, were to be ‘machines for living in’, calibrated to maximise the supply of biological necessities – heat, hygiene, air circulation, food and even sexual reproduction.

Architects’ Data (1936) by the German modernist architect Ernst Neufert is still used by architects looking for the most efficient dimensions for kitchens, bedrooms or even park benches. In the 1920s Neufert was an assistant to Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Later, on behalf of the Nazi Party, he oversaw the standardisation of Germany’s building industry, which was largely powered by enslaved labour. Several Bauhaus graduates designed concentration camps. The deliberate degradation of living conditions inverted the task of modern architecture from the enhancement of life to the production of death.

Lemkin defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement.

Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide of destruction... READ MORE 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n07/eyal-weizman/all-they-will-find-is-sand 

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

  

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/776402/ungrounding-by-eyal-weizman/

Eyal Weizman’s new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, will be published next month. 

The terrifying reality of life under US sanctions by Brian Feeny in The Irish Times... & Francesca Albanese responds "Surely my life is not easy. But it is nothing compared to that of the Palestinians under Israeli Apartheid, who continue to be genocided and tortured. With or without sanctions, I will not stop standing for justice. Together we can and we will. #UNA"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/brian-feeney-the-terrifying-reality-of-life-under-us-sanctions/ar-AA21agBN
 The Irish News 

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

@FranceskAlbs

 

Surely my life is not easy. But it is nothing compared to that of the Palestinians under Israeli Apartheid, who continue to be genocided and tortured. With or without sanctions, I will not stop standing for justice. Together we can and we will. #UNA

 https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/2045443737916940457

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

News is propaganda everywhere with America duped, taxpayers robbed, & international law ignored while war mongering Israel aggressively gains endless power and resources.

Israel VS Palestine & Israel VS Iran & Israel VS US ... Western mainstream media's blockade of the actual facts 

"Israel created the largest group of child amputees in modern history and now blocks prostheses... The cruelty is always the point." Assal Rad

 

 Assal Rad

@AssalRad

Israel created the largest group of child amputees in modern history and now blocks prostheses.

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045621575605686401 

 

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

 

 

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

So, Israel wants to occupy and attack Lebanon. Yeah, that’s not a ceasefire.

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045752659463053551 

Assal Rad

 

@AssalRad

Notice the euphemisms? 

 

“Retain buffer zone” = Illegally occupy Lebanese territory 

 

 “Freedom of action” = Attack whenever they want

 

 

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

“Whether people like Israel or not, they have proven to be a great ally…” 

 

By lying and leading us into reckless wars? Or taking billions of taxpayer dollars away from Americans in need to slaughter children? Or is it the foreign influence in our politics that makes it great?

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045675848947409167/photo/1 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

This discussion is completely absent in Western media.

 https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045349407579836646

 

 

& 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Name the killer and the crime  

 

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045399038930153742 

 

 

Statement by UNICEF on the killing of two water truck drivers in the Gaza Strip: UNICEF is outraged by the killing of two drivers of trucks contracted by UNICEF to provide clean water to families in the Gaza Strip. The victims were killed by Israeli fire -17 April 2026  https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-killing-two-water-truck-drivers-gaza-strip-0

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Israel killed two UNICEF drivers trying to get WATER to families in Gaza. Is this story going to get any coverage? Or is the ongoing genocide not newsworthy? 

 

 https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2045301464978075788

 

 

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]