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climate crisis
'A Disgrace': Trump Budget Gives $1 Trillion to Military While Slashing Programs for Working Class
"President Trump has made his priorities clear as day: He wants to outright defund programs that help working Americans while he shovels massive tax breaks at billionaires like himself."
May 02, 2025
The budget blueprint that U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled Friday would give a record $1.01 trillion to the American military for the coming fiscal year while imposing $163 billion in total cuts to housing, education, healthcare, climate, and labor programs.
The proposal, released by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, was viewed by Democratic lawmakers and other critics as a clear statement of the White House's intent to gut programs that working class Americans rely on while pursuing another round of tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and bolstering the Pentagon, a morass of waste and abuse.
"President Trump has made his priorities clear as day," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. "He wants to outright defund programs that help working Americans while he shovels massive tax breaks at billionaires like himself and raises taxes on middle-class Americans with his reckless tariffs."
"This president believes we should shred at least $163 billion in investments here at home that make all the difference for families and have been essential to America's success—but that we should hand billionaires and the biggest corporations trillions in new tax breaks," Murray added. "That is outrageous—and it should offend every hardworking American who wants their tax dollars to help them live a good life, not pad the pockets of billionaires."
"Trump is prioritizing his own wallet and the tax benefits of his wealthy donors—leaving local communities and small towns to bear the brunt of his cuts."
According to the OMB summary, Trump's Fiscal Year 2026 budget would cut over $4.5 billion from Title I and K-12 education programs, $4 billion from a program that provides heating assistance to low-income households, $2.4 billion from safe drinking water funding, $26 billion from rental assistance programs, $17 billion from the National Institutes of Health, $100 million from environmental justice programs, $1.3 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and $4.6 billion from the Labor Department.
"President Trump is again betraying the millions of Americans who believed him when he promised to lower costs," Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement. "This time, he's taking aim at anyone who attends a public school, relies on rental assistance to keep a roof over their heads, or accesses healthcare through Medicaid or Medicare."
"Instead of standing up for everyday Americans," said Carrk, "Trump is prioritizing his own wallet and the tax benefits of his wealthy donors—leaving local communities and small towns to bear the brunt of his cuts."
Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, noted that the cuts to social programs in the White House's budget proposal "are extreme by any standard, but they're extreme even by Trump's own standards," far exceeding even what he proposed during his first term.
"The cuts in this budget are especially egregious," said Kogan, "when you consider that Trump is also trying to push the largest Medicaid and food assistance cuts in American history through Congress over the next few months."
Meanwhile, the U.S. military would see a $113 billion budget increase compared to current levels if the Republican-controlled Congress were to enact Trump's proposal. The 13% increase would push the nation's annual military budget above $1 trillion, which analysts have described as the highest level since the Second World War.
"The Pentagon is bloated, wasteful, and has NEVER passed an audit," the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen wrote in response to Trump's budget. "What a disgrace."
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To Honor the Earth, Let Us Tear Down the Walls in Our Hearts
Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible money god who holds us hostage.
Apr 25, 2025
Let Earth Day be every day! Let it transcend the present state of politics and our economic hierarchy. Let it open us to the future we long for but do not yet envision.
We live on one vulnerable, extraordinary planet. We are not its overlords; we are part of an evolving circle of life, which we are still trying to understand. And we can only understand it if we also value it, ever so deeply. Earth Day is also Love Day.
Oh God, let it flow beyond the invisible borders we have created. To that end, I call forth the late Pope Francis, who died two days ago as I write—a day before Earth Day 2025. He was 88. Unlike most world leaders, he saw the need to transcend the present worldview—including religion—that currently holds the planet hostage.
The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life.
As Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado professor and contributor to the Jesuit publication America Magazine, noted recently in a Democracy Now interview, Pope Francis was insistent on linking major political issues, such as protecting the planet’s ecosystem and halting the war on migrants. “Justice for both,” Schneider said. We must “counter the idea of disposability.”
This is a cry from the depths of our soul. Value the planet. Value all of humanity. We have to reach beyond the world we think we know and, as the Pope put it, according to Schneider, “learn from the periphery.”
The migrant crisis and the climate crisis are intertwined. The Pope “called for solidarity across borders. He called for taking down the idols of our world—the things that we think are real that really aren’t: borders created with imaginary lines.”
That is to say: Tear down that wall, this is a wall we’ve built in our own hearts. Planet Earth is a single entity; our complex differences are interrelated. Yes, conflict is inevitable, but dehumanizing those with whom we disagree is never the answer. Yes, this is an inconvenience for those in power—and for those who want, and feel entitled, to use up the planet for personal gain. Humanity, as Pope Francis understood, is at an extraordinary transition point: beyond exploitation.
As Cynthia Kaufman writes:
The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function...
Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
Principles of solidarity? This is a huge leap for the part of humanity that assumes itself to be in control of the future. Kaufman is not talking about an alliance of good guys against bad guys, but solidarity in a total way: solidarity with the planet and its extraordinarily complex ecosystem. “Solidarity” values continuous learning, understanding, and protecting, not simply controlling. That is to say: environmental stewardship.
According to the Earthday website:
It is widely acknowledged that Indigenous people, despite making up just 5% of the global population, protect a significant amount of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a term for the collective Indigenous knowledge and beliefs about nature and man’s place in it, and serves as an alternative to the more objective and resource-oriented Western worldview of the environment as something to be exploited.
I would put it this way: Planet Earth has a soul.
I say this in a non-religious way, without a sense of explanatory understanding, just a sense of wonder. The planet itself is alive. And life itself should be what we value most, not... money (the invisible god).
As Earthday notes:
Like the Maōri, many Indigenous communities consider themselves “guardians” of their local environmental resources.
Within the 2.7 million square miles of the Amazon Rainforest, there are approximately 400 distinct tribes which call the rainforest home. The Guajajara tribe, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are particularly known for their fierce protection of their local forests from illegal loggers, and continue to risk their lives daily for their home.
Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible god who holds us hostage. I don’t say this with a simple shrug but, rather, without knowing how this will happen—just that it must. The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life. This is what I have called empathic sanity. Real change is impossible without it.
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Capitalism Eating Itself by Fueling Climate Mayhem, Warns Capitalist
If humanity stays on current course, warns top insurer, the "financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable."
Apr 03, 2025
A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels.
According to GüntherThallinger, a former top executive at Germany's branch of the consulting giant McKinsey & Company and currently a board member of Allianz SE, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, the climate crisis is on a path to destroy capitalism as we know it.
"We are fast approaching temperature levels—1.5C, 2C, 3C—where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many" of the risks associated with the climate crisis, Thallinger writes in a recent post highlighted Thursday by The Guardian.
"Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
With "entire regions becoming uninsurable," he continues, the soaring costs of rebuilding and the insecurity of investments "threaten the very foundation of the financial sector," which he describes as " a climate-induced credit crunch" that will reverberate across national economies and globally.
"This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry," he warns. "The economic value of entire regions—coastal, arid, wildfire-prone—will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like."
Commenting on the Guardian's coverage of Thallinger's declaration, Dan Taylor, a senior lecturer in social and political thought at the Open University, said, "Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
While climate scientists, experts, and activists for decades have issued warning after warning of the threats posed by the burning of coal, oil, and gas and humanity's consumption of products derived from fossil fuels, the insurance industry has been the arm of capitalism most attuned to the lurking dangers.
"Here go the radical leftist insurance companies again," said David Abernathy, professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College, in a caustic response to Thallinger's latest warnings.
Despite their understanding of the threat, however, the world's insurers have primarily aimed to have it both ways, participating in the carnage by continuing to insure fossil fuel projects and underwriting expansion of the industry while increasingly attempting to offset their exposure to financial losses by changing policy agreements and lobbying governments for ever-increasing protections and preferable regulatory conditions.
In the post, self-published to LinkedIn last week, Thallinger—who has over many years lobbied for a more sustainable form of capitalism and led calls for a net-zero framework for corporations and industries—warned of the growing stress put on the insurance market worldwide by extreme weather events—including storms, floods, and fires—that ultimately will undermine the ability of markets to function or governments to keep pace with the costs:
There is no way to "adapt" to temperatures beyond human tolerance. There is limited adaptation to megafires, other than not building near forests. Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill. And as temperatures continue to rise, adaptation itself becomes economically unviable.
Once we reach 3°C of warming, the situation locks in. Atmospheric energy at this level will persist for 100+ years due to carbon cycle inertia and the absence of scalable industrial carbon removal technologies. There is no known pathway to return to pre-2°C conditions. (See: IPCC AR6, 2023; NASA Earth Observatory: "The Long-Term Warming Commitment")
At that point, risk cannot be transferred (no insurance), risk cannot be absorbed (no public capacity), and risk cannot be adapted to (physical limits exceeded). That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.
In an interview earlier this year, Thallinger explained that failure to act on the crisis of a rapidly warming planet is not just perilous for humanity and natural systems but doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.
"The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation," Thallinger said in February. "Extreme heat, storms, wildfires, floods, and billions in economic damage occur each year. In 2024, insured natural catastrophe losses surpassed $140 billion, marking the fifth straight year above $100 billion."
"Transitioning to a net-zero economy is not just about sustainability," he continued, "it is a financial and operational necessity to avoid a future where climate shocks outpace our ability to recover, straining governments, businesses, and households. Without decisive action, we risk crossing a threshold where adaptation is no longer possible, and the costs—human and financial—become unimaginable."
Thallinger's solution to the crisis is not to subvert the capitalist system by transitioning the world to an economic system based on shared resources, communal ownership, or a more enlightened egalitarian response. Instead, he proposes that a "reformed" capitalism is the solution, writing, "Capitalism must now solve this existential threat."
Calling for a reduction of emissions and a rapid scale-up of green energy technologies is the path forward, he argues, asking readers to understand "this is not about saving the planet," but rather "saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilization itself can continue to operate."
This disconnect was not lost on astute observers, including Antía Casted, a senior researcher at the Sir Michael Marmot Institute of Health Equity, who suggested concern over Thallinger's prescription.
"It would be fine if [the climate crisis] destroyed civilization and maintained capitalism," Casted noted. "They just need to find a way for capitalism to work without people."
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