October, 17 2016, 12:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Email:,info(at)fwwatch(dot)org,Seth Gladstone -,sgladstone@fwwatch.org
DOJ Must Act to Protect First Amendment, Water and Climate
Statement by Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch
WASHINGTON
"North Dakota has charged journalist Amy Goodman and filmmaker Deia Schlosberg for doing their jobs: reporting and documenting the peaceful protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This string of arrests constitutes nothing less than a war on journalism and a victory for fossil fuel interests that have banked on the pipeline.
"We call on the Department of Justice to act to protect the first amendment rights of those attempting to tell the stories of the water protectors fighting the risky pipeline. The DOJ must investigate the arrests of Amy Goodman and Deia Schlosberg at the hands of North Dakota police.
"The first amendment is not only a cornerstone of our bill of rights, but the right to free speech and freedom of the press is critical to addressing our climate chaos. We need brave journalists to tell the stories of injustice that are occurring at the hands of the banks and fossil fuel companies seeking to extract every last drop of fossil fuels for profit--no matter the cost.
"We applaud Goodman and Schlosberg for courageously documenting the peaceful actions at Standing Rock and call upon Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate their arrests and act to protect the first amendment rights of those attempting to tell the stories of the water protectors fighting this risky pipeline."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
Tax Rates for Big Corporations Fell by Nearly Half After Trump Cuts
And this is the policy Republicans and their presumptive presidential nominee are vowing to extend if they win in November.
May 02, 2024
Large, profitable U.S. corporations have seen their effective tax rates fall by more than 40% since Republicans and their presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, Donald Trump, rammed through an unpopular law that they want to preserve and extend.
According to a new report published Thursday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the tax rates paid by big and consistently profitable corporations dropped from 22% to 12.8% after the enactment of Trump's tax law, which slashed the statutory corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
"In 2017, Congress and President Trump had a chance to reform our corporate tax system," Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP and co-author of the new report. "Instead, they just gutted it."
ITEP's analysis examines 296 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies that were consistently profitable between 2013 and 2021. Even as the companies' combined profits surged by 44%, they "paid $240 billion less in taxes from 2018 to 2021 than they would have paid under the effective rates they paid before the Trump law," according to ITEP.
Verizon, for instance, went from paying an effective tax rate of 21% in the several years preceding the Trump tax cuts to paying 8% in the three years following the law's enactment. Walmart's effective rate fell from 31% to 17%, Meta's fell from 28% to 18%, and Lockheed Martin's dropped from 33% to 15%.
"The signature legislative accomplishment of the Trump administration was the 2017 corporate tax cut," said ITEP senior fellow Michael Ettlinger, a report co-author. "This study shows that the largest of companies, from Verizon to Walmart, have been the biggest beneficiaries."
Critics of the Trump-GOP tax law have from the beginning derided it as a "scam," denouncing Republicans' false promise that the cuts would deliver significant benefits to working- and middle-class families. In reality, the measure's benefits have flowed disproportionately to wealthy individuals and large corporations.
During a fundraiser last month at the home of billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson, Trump pledged to his donors that he would work to keep their taxes low by extending the 2017 law if he's reelected. Extending provisions of the tax law that are set to expire at the end of next year would overwhelmingly benefit rich households, according to the Tax Policy Center.
ITEP noted Thursday that in the wake of the tax law's passage, the number of major U.S. corporations paying an effective tax rate of less than 10% rose from 56 to 95, and the number paying less than 5% rose from 41 to 53.
"The primary reasons these large corporations have seen tax cuts of this magnitude are clear," the new report states. "Most importantly, the 2017 tax law drastically cut the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 to 21%. It also expanded tax breaks for corporate expenses characterized as capital investment and expanded other ways to minimize U.S. tax liability. The law also reduced some tax avoidance mechanisms but, taken as a whole, it increased these companies' ability to take advantage of tax breaks."
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Nearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah 'Injured, Sick, Malnourished,' Says UNICEF
A full-scale Israeli assault on the crowded southern Gaza city "would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children."
May 02, 2024
"The children in Gaza need a cease-fire."
That's how Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), concluded a brief video Wednesday about the harrowing conditions across the Gaza Strip, particularly in Rafah, where about 1.5 million of the besieged enclave's 2.3 million residents have sought refuge from Israel's devastating assault.
The video was released nearly seven months into Israel's retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack—which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in Gaza, wounded another 77,816, and left thousands more missing—and as a full-scale Israeli assault of Rafah looms.
The war has already taken "an unimaginable toll," and a major military operation against the crowded southern Gaza city "would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children," Russell warned. "Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities."
"Many have been displaced multiple times and lost homes, parents, and loved ones," the UNICEF chief noted. "There is nowhere safe to go in Gaza. Homes throughout the Gaza Strip lie in ruin. Roads are destroyed and the ground littered with unexploded ordnances."
"Rafah is also the main hub for the humanitarian response, which includes UNICEF, and the city has some of the last functioning healthcare facilities," she explained.
Israeli forces launched at least 435 attacks on health facilities or personnel during the first six months of the war, and just 10 of the enclave's 36 hospitals remain partially functional, according to the World Health Organization. As Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, thousands of Palestinian child amputees are struggling to recover due to the destruction of Gaza's healthcare system.
"UNICEF continues to call for the protection of all women and children in Rafah and throughout the Gaza Strip—and the protection of the infrastructure, services, and humanitarian aid they rely on," said Russell. "We repeat our calls for the unconditional release of all hostages in Gaza who need to be home with their children and families. The violence must end."
The agency's five core demands for Gaza are:
- An immediate and long-lasting humanitarian cease-fire;
- Safe and unrestricted humanitarian access;
- The immediate, safe, and unconditional release of all abducted children, and an end to any grave violations against all children;
- Respect and protection for civilian infrastructure; and
- Allow patients with urgent medical cases to safely access critical health services or leave.
As Russell called for peace in video form, James Elder, UNICEF's global spokesperson, penned a Wednesday opinion piece for The Guardian following his recent trips to Gaza. He began with a startling anecdote:
The war against Gaza's children is forcing many to close their eyes. Nine-year-old Mohamed's eyes were forced shut, first by the bandages that covered a gaping hole in the back of his head, and second by the coma caused by the blast that hit his family home. He is nine. Sorry, he was nine. Mohamed is now dead.
"From looming famine to soaring death tolls, the latest fear is the much-threatened offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza," he wrote. "Can it get any worse? It always seems to."
"Rafah will implode if it is targeted militarily," Elder stressed. "Water is in desperately short supply, not just for drinking but sanitation. In Rafah there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people. The situation is four times worse for showers. That is, around one shower for every 3,500 people. Try to imagine, as a teenage girl, or elderly man, or pregnant woman, queueing for an entire day just to have a shower."
On October 31, just weeks after the start of what the International Court of Justice has since determined is Israel's plausibly genocidal assault, UNICEF called Gaza a "graveyard" for children.
"Can it get any worse? It always seems to."
"Last month I saw new graveyards in Rafah being constructed. And filled," wrote Elder. "Every day the war brings more violent death and destruction. In my 20 years with the United Nations, I have never seen devastation like that I saw in the Gaza Strip cities of Khan Younis and Gaza City. And now we are told to expect the same via an incursion in Rafah."
Elder recalled that "in the north of the territory, close to where a UNICEF vehicle came under fire last month, a woman clutched my hand and pleaded, over and over, that the world send food, water, and medicine. I will never forget how, as I felt her grasp, I tried to explain we were trying, and she continued to plead."
"Why? Because she assumed the world did not know what was happening in Gaza. Because if the world knew, how could they possibly let this happen?" he continued. "How, indeed. The world has certainly been warned about Rafah. It remains to be seen how many eyes stay, or are forced, shut."
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Biden Condemned for Ahistorical and 'Politically Suicidal' Attack on Campus Protests
"Biden's claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
May 02, 2024
President Joe Biden faced immediate backlash Thursday for characterizing pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have erupted on university campuses across the country as lawless and violent, a narrative likely to further alienate the thousands of students who have joined peaceful protests against Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza in recent weeks.
In brief, unscheduled remarks delivered from the White House, Biden acknowledged that "peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues."
But he then proceeded to cast recent campus demonstrations as abhorrent, using instances of property damage to broadly paint student protesters as out of control—giving a pass to police forces and pro-Israel mobs that have brutally attacked peaceful encampments.
Biden, who has armed Israel's military to the hilt, also conflated trespassing and disruptions of day-to-day campus activities—including classes and graduations—with violence, saying, "None of this is a peaceful protest."
"Dissent must never lead to disorder," the president said, ignoring the long history of disruptive civil rights and anti-war protests in the U.S. "There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos."
Watch Biden's remarks in full:
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said Thursday that "President Biden's claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses, he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests," Mitchell added.
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wrote following the president's remarks that "the best speech of Biden's campaign was in June 2020, amid the nationwide protests against the murder of George Floyd."
"He could've given a very similar speech today, if only he thought the same rights and principles applied to Palestinians," Duss added. "In June 2020, Biden criticized violence but also refused to paint the protests with that broad brush. He acknowledged the root causes, the pain driving them. He could've made some effort to do the same today, instead he chose to amplify a right-wing caricature."
Countering suggestions that criticism of Biden could harm his reelection chances against former President Donald Trump, Duss pointed to an old social media post in which he explained: "One of my concerns here is that Biden is undermining his re-election. In addition to being morally and strategically awful, I think his Gaza policy is alienating and demobilizing constituencies he will need."
At the end of his speech, a reporter asked Biden whether the mass demonstrations on college campuses have led him to reconsider his approach to Israel's assault on Gaza, which to date has been unconditionally supportive even in the face of horrific Israeli war crimes.
"No," Biden said in response to the reporter's question.
"Apparently Biden is not swayed by the mass killing of children, international law, or an election as a growing number of Americans are appalled by his policies," Assal Rad, an author and Middle East analyst, wrote in reply to the president.
Biden to young people: go fuck yourselves, I’m sticking with Israel and its genocide.
Absolutely surreal, sad, politically suicidal, grotesque. https://t.co/96RIQE2ZO5
— Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) May 2, 2024
Justice Democrats called Biden's speech "shameful," writing that "as campuses have unleashed police on students—he blames protesters as the problem and ignores the violence they've faced."
"If dissent was crucial to our democracy," the progressive group added, "you would spend more time listening to their demands than lying about their tactics."
Biden's address came hours after Los Angeles police launched a violent attack on pro-Palestinian demonstrators at UCLA, where a pro-Israel mob brutally assaulted student protesters just a day earlier.
In a statement earlier this week, College Democrats of America endorsed the Gaza solidarity protests that have swept the nation and warned Democratic leaders that each day they "fail to stand united for a permanent cease-fire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party."
"We condemn those politicians, like MAGA Republicans and many other lawmakers, for smearing all protesters as hateful when, according to reports, the overwhelming majority of protests are peaceful," said the College Democrats.
In a floor speech on Wednesday, Sanders called out his colleagues who "are spending their time attacking the protesters rather than the Netanyahu government, which has caused and has created this horrific situation."
Sanders noted that the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) "was arrested 45 times for sit-ins and protests, 45 times for protesting segregation and racism."
"Protesting injustice and expressing our opinions is part of our American tradition," said the Vermont senator. "And when you talk about America being a free country, well, you know what, whether you like it or not, the right to protest is what American freedom is all about."
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