June, 14 2017, 12:15pm EDT
![Jubilee USA Network](https://assets.rbl.ms/32012649/origin.jpg)
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Abby Wilhelm, Communications Director abby@jubileeusa.org
(202) 783-3566 x109
Jubilee USA Statement on Greek Eurozone Debt Negotiation
The International Monetary Fund, Eurozone Finance Ministers and Greek officials meet Thursday in Luxembourg to negotiate financing and further debt restructuring for Greece.
Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of the religious development group Jubilee USA, releases the following statement:
"It's time to deal with Greece's debt now. Greece won't see sustainable economic growth unless it receives significant debt relief. We can't keep kicking the can down the road.
WASHINGTON
The International Monetary Fund, Eurozone Finance Ministers and Greek officials meet Thursday in Luxembourg to negotiate financing and further debt restructuring for Greece.
Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of the religious development group Jubilee USA, releases the following statement:
"It's time to deal with Greece's debt now. Greece won't see sustainable economic growth unless it receives significant debt relief. We can't keep kicking the can down the road.
"In 1953, Germany benefited from a sweeping debt restructuring that included both significant debt relief and rescheduling debt payments into the future. The London Accord plan led to a prosperous Germany. Now we need a similar plan for a prosperous Greece and a prosperous European Union.
"We can never forget that Greece's high-stake debt negotiations have a growing human cost. In order to limit austerity and protect people's livelihoods, serious debt relief must be a part of a solution as soon as possible."
Jubilee USA Network is an interfaith, non-profit alliance of religious, development and advocacy organizations. We are 75 U.S. institutions and more than 750 faith groups working across the United States and around the globe. We address the structural causes of poverty and inequality in our communities and countries around the world.
(202) 783-3566LATEST NEWS
'Julian Assange Is Free': WikiLeaks Founder Strikes Plea Deal With US
"We thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom," said WikiLeaks. "Julian's freedom is our freedom."
Jun 24, 2024
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday reached a deal with the U.S. government, agreeing to plead guilty to one felony related to the disclosure of national security information in exchange for his release from Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom.
A related document was filed in federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. Under the plea agreement, which must still be approved by a judge, the Department of Justice will seek a 62-month sentence, equal to the time that the 52-year-old Australian has served in the U.K. prison while battling his extradition to the United States.
Assange faced the risk of spending the rest of his life in U.S. prison if convicted of Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges for publishing classified material including the "Collateral Murder" video and the Afghan and Iraq war logs. Before Belmarsh, he spent seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London with asylum protections.
"Julian Assange is free," WikiLeaks declared on the social media platform X, confirming that he left Belmarsh Friday "after having spent 1,901 days there," locked in a small cell for 23 hours a day.
"He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead Airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the U.K.," WikiLeaks said. "This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grassroots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators, and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations."
"He will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars," the group continued. "WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know. As he returns to Australia."
The news of Assange's release was celebrated by people around the world, who also blasted the U.S. for continuing to pursue charges against him and the U.K. for going along with it.
"Takeaway from the 12 years of Assange persecution: We need a world where independent journalists work in freedom and top war criminals go to prison—not the other way around," the progressive advocacy group and longtime Assange supporter RootsAction
said on social media.
Leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in a statement: "I congratulate Julian Assange on his freedom. Assange's eternal imprisonment and torture was an attack on press freedom on a global scale. Denouncing the massacre of civilians in Iraq by the U.S. war machine was his 'crime'; now the massacre is repeated in Gaza I invite Julian and his wife Stella to visit Colombia and let's take action for true freedom."
Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt, who represents Melbourne in Parliament, said on social media that "Julian Assange will finally be free. While great news, this has been over a decade of his life wasted by U.S. overreach."
"Journalism is not a crime," Bandt added. "Pursuing Assange was anti-democratic, anti-press freedom, and the charges should have been dropped."
After more than five years in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison in the UK, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange reached a plea deal with the U.S. government. The deal allows for his release and return to his home country of Australia after a formal sentencing at a US court in the… pic.twitter.com/5S3xdbZnG2
— CODEPINK (@codepink) June 25, 2024
The women-led peace group CodePink said in a statement:
Without Julian Assange's critical journalism, the world would know a lot less about war crimes committed by the United States and its allies. He is the reason so many anti-war organizations like ours have the proof we need to fight the war machine in the belly of the beast. CodePink celebrates Julian's release and commends his brave journalism.
One of the most horrific videos published by WikiLeaks was called "Collateral Murder," footage of the U.S. military opening fire on a group of unarmed civilians–including Reuters journalists–in Baghdad. While Julian has been in captivity for the past 14 years, the war criminals that destroyed Iraq walked free. Many are still in government positions today or living off the profits of weapons contracts.
While Julian pleads guilty to espionage—we uphold him as a giant of journalistic integrity.
Vahid Razavi, founder of Ethics in Tech and host of multiple NSA Comedy Nights focusing on government mass surveillance, told Common Dreams that "they took a hero and turned him into a criminal."
"Meanwhile, all of the war criminals in the files exposed by WikiLeaks via Chelsea Manning are free and never faced any punishment or even their day in court," he added. "You can kill journalists with impunity, just like Israel is doing right now in Gaza."
Former United Nations human rights official Craig Mokhiber, who
resigned from his job last year over the world body's refusal to prevent Israel's slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, said on social media that "political prisoner Julian Assange, persecuted for years for the crime of journalism, simply for telling the truth about U.S. war crimes, is free."
Mokhiber hailed what he called "a moment of light in an age of darkness."
British journalist Afshin Rattansi said, "Let no one think that any of us will ever forget what the British state did to the most famous journalist of his generation."
"They tortured him—according to the United Nations special rapporteur on torture—at the behest of the United States," Rattansi noted.
Andrew Kennis, a professor of journalism and social media at Rutgers University, told Common Dreams that "Julian Assange is nothing less than the Daniel Ellsberg of our time."
"His journalism revealed more war crimes by the U.S. than any other publisher in the world, and far more extensively than what Ellsberg was able to pull off with a photocopy machine," he added. "But as opposed to receiving a deserved pardon... the persecution of Assange has been indicative of the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy these days: Prosecute the whistleblowers exposing war crimes while funding Israeli war criminals in an ongoing attempt at genocide against occupied Palestine."
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UN to Warn Half a Million Gazans Facing 'Catastrophic' Food Insecurity
"The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now," said one advocate.
Jun 24, 2024
More than 1 in 5 people in the Gaza Strip are "facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity" amid Israel's relentless assault and siege against the Palestinian territory, according to a draft report set to be published Tuesday by the United Nations' hunger monitoring system.
The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Acute Food Insecurity Special Snapshot—which was previewed by various news agencies—says that more than 495,000 Gazans—who already face "an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion"—are expected to suffer the highest level of starvation over the coming months.
The draft report states that while a sharp increase in food aid in northern Gaza in March and April can be credited with "likely averting a famine," the situation is "deteriorating again following renewed hostilities."
"A high risk of famine persists across the whole of the Gaza Strip as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted," IPC noted.
The IPC draft report also says more than half of all Gaza households had to sell or swap clothing in order to obtain food, and that the majority of Gazan families often "do not have any food to eat in the house, and over 20% go entire days and nights without eating."
"The population cannot endure these hardships any longer."
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, an Oregon-based humanitarian NGO, toldThe Guardian that "people are enduring subhuman conditions resorting to desperate measures like boiling weeds, eating animal feed, and exchanging clothes for money to stave off hunger and keep their children alive."
"The humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly, and the specter of famine continues to hang over Gaza," she added. "The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now. The population cannot endure these hardships any longer."
Although the IPC stopped short of the rare step of declaring a famine in Gaza, it warned that "the recent trajectory is negative and highly unstable."
"Should this continue, the improvements seen in April could be rapidly reversed," the agency added.
The IPC's famine review panel previously said there is not enough data to make a determination on whether there is a famine in Gaza since research was being blocked by "conflict and humanitarian access constraints."
The Geneva-based group Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Monday that "the Famine Review Committee's inability to declare the current food situation in the Gaza Strip to be a famine does not negate the existence of famine in the strip, as pockets of famine are forming and spreading among different age groups, particularly children, and there is a noticeable increase in deaths from hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases."
"The committee's failure to declare the existence of a famine is solely related to its inability to provide certain technical information because of illegal Israeli restrictions and policies that aim to conceal evidence related to the crimes it commits and prevent criminal investigations into them by independent U.N. and international committees, particularly by preventing these committees from entering the strip," the group added.
U.N. World Food Program Executive Director Cindy McCain said last month that "full-blown famine" had taken hold in Gaza and was spreading south. According to Gaza officials, at least 40 people—mostly children—have died from malnutrition and dehydration during the 262-day Israeli onslaught. Almost all of the victims are from northern Gaza.
Israel began bombing, and later invaded, Gaza after Hamas-led attacks left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead and over 240 others kidnapped on October 7. At least some of the victims were killed by Israeli forces in so-called "friendly fire" incidents, according to Israeli and international media reports.
Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 37,626 Palestinians—most of them women and children—in Gaza, while wounding over 86,000 others, according to Palestinian and international agencies. At least 11,000 people, including over 4,000 children, are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings.
Michael Fakhri, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food and a law professor at the University of Oregon, said in late February that Israel is committing genocide by intentionally starving Gazans. Israel's siege—and Israeli attacks on humanitarian aid shipments, workers, and recipients—are being reviewed by the International Court of Justice as part of a South Africa-led genocide case backed by over 30 countries and regional blocs.
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​Analysis Shows How Surging Stock Buybacks Bolster Case for Corporate Tax Hike​
Corporations using cash "to further enrich already affluent shareholders suggests that partially reversing the corporate rate cut, as President Biden has proposed, poses little risk to investment or the broader economy."
Jun 24, 2024
With a battle over congressional Republicans and former U.S. President Donald Trump's 2017 tax law brewing, a progressive think tank on Monday published an analysis that points to the surge in stock buybacks as proof that federal policymakers should raise the corporate tax rate.
When Trump—the presumptive GOP nominee to challenge President Joe Biden in November—signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, he declared that "corporations are literally going wild over this, I think even beyond my expectations."
Chuck Marr, vice president for federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) wrote in his new analysis that "other studies have shown that the corporate rate cut overwhelmingly benefits high-income people and has failed to deliver to workers the benefits its proponents promised."
He referenced research from the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and University of North Carolina as well as the Joint Committee on Taxation and Federal Reserve Board that exposes how the law hasn't lived up to the GOP's claims.
"The fact that it also launched massive buybacks is a further reason why policymakers should revisit the rate cut next year—part of the larger course correction needed in the nation's revenue policies as major pieces of the 2017 law expire," Marr argued.
Buyback is a term for when a company purchases its own outstanding stock to reduce the number of shares on the market and increase the value of the remaining ones, a practice that further enriches shareholders.
"Excluding the pandemic-induced recession in 2020, buybacks have been markedly higher every year since the 2017 law, and are projected to top $1 trillion in 2025 for the first time," Marr noted, citing Goldman Sachs.
Some companies—such as John Deere—have even laid off workers while buying back stock, as Common Dreams has reported.
"The fact that corporations have significant excess cash beyond their investment needs and are using it to further enrich already affluent shareholders suggests that partially reversing the corporate rate cut, as President Biden has proposed, poses little risk to investment or the broader economy," Marr wrote. The president's proposed rate is 28%.
"Policymakers have an opportunity to move away from corporate tax cuts that haven't delivered on their economic promises and toward a tax system that raises more revenue through progressive policies like increasing the corporate tax rate," he explained. "They can then use those revenues for investments to make the economy work better for everyone, such as an expanded child tax credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, childcare, and housing."
Marr also urged lawmakers to go even further and "raise the excise tax on stock buybacks to 4% from the current 1%."
The CBBP is far from alone in framing the looming expiration of some tax cuts as a chance to pursue more progressive policy. In fact, the center is part of a coalition led by Groundwork Collaborative that is calling on Congress to "use the expiration of these provisions as an opportunity to address long-standing problems with our tax code, not just to tinker around the edges."
Some progressives on Capitol Hill—such as Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who supports a wealth tax targeting the richest Americans—are also seizing the moment.
Warren said earlier this month: "It's time to stiffen our spines. President Biden is right: If the 2025 tax bill doesn't call on the wealthy and giant corporations to shoulder a bigger share of what it costs to run this country, Democrats should reject it outright. No more Trump tax breaks for billionaires."
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