March, 07 2018, 11:00am EDT
Senate Democrats Release Strong Infrastructure Package, Contrasting Pitfalls of Trump Administration's Shameful Wall Street Giveaways
Statement of Mary Grant, Water For All Campaign Director, Food & Water Watch
WASHINGTON
"The newly released Senate Democrat infrastructure package stands in sharp contrast with the Trump administration's regressive and unjust plan that would exacerbate many of our nation's infrastructure emergencies. The Senate Democrat proposal would rollback a portion of the Trump administration's massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations to offer a real funding proposal for our nation's infrastructure. In particular, it provides strong support to our aging and unaffordable water systems and recognizes that privatizing our water systems offers no solution.
"The Senate Democrat proposal provides real federal funding to the tried-and-true Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Fund programs and USDA's rural water grant program. The Trump administration's budget proposes eliminating rural water grants altogether, and the Trump administration's infrastructure blueprint would seek to hand our water systems over to Wall Street without a single additional dollar to the State Revolving Fund programs, which are the primary source of federal support for our public water and sewer systems. Food & Water Watch urges Senate Democrats to continue to resist the Trump administration's efforts to slash environmental regulations, cut federal funding for public water, and incentivize the privatization of our essential public services and assets.
"For our future, we need Congress to follow the Senate Democrats' vision and step up in the long-term to provide a dedicated source of funding for our water infrastructure by passing the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (WATER) Act. The WATER Act is the most comprehensive approach to improving our water systems and helping ensure that every person has access to safe and clean water in the United States while simultaneously creating nearly a million jobs."
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.
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Vietnam Sentences Billionaire to Death for White Collar Fraud
The trials of Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan and 84 others are part of an anti-corruption campaign led by the head of Vietnam's Communist Party.
Apr 11, 2024
As global billionaires see their wealth soar to record heights, one Vietnamese real estate tycoon was sentenced to death on Thursday in the Southeast Asian nation's largest-ever financial fraud case, part of a government crackdown on corruption.
Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan, founder of the real estate developer Vạn Thịnh Phát Group, was arrested in October 2022 for illegally controlling and embezzling money from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for a decade after a 2011 merger she arranged.
"Lan embezzled $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27 billion—a figure equivalent to 6% of the country's 2023 [gross domestic product]," according toAgence France-Presse. "The court ordered Lan, 67, to pay almost the entire damages sum in compensation."
The BCCreported that "according to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4 billion in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes."
AFP spoke with one of the 42,000 victims of the scandal identified by authorities:
Nga, a 67-year-old Hanoi resident... told AFP Thursday that she had hoped for a life sentence for Lan so she could live to fully witness the pain her actions had caused ordinary people.
"Many people worked hard to deposit money into the bank, but now she's received the death sentence and that's it for her," said Nga, using a pseudonym to protect her identity.
"She can't see the suffering of the people."
Nga has so far been unable to retrieve the $120,000 she invested with SCB.
Human rights advocates consider Vietnam to be a global leader in death penalty sentences and executions, though data on the topic are considered state secrets, so precise figures are not known.
"From January to early October 2023, at least 189 people have been sentenced to death in Vietnam," The Vietnamese Magazinereported last year, citing state media reports. Among them, "44 were convicted of murder (23%), while the remaining 145 (77%) were involved in illegally trading or transporting narcotic substances."
Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty in all cases, released its latest annual report on sentences and executions worldwide last May. While noting the Vietnamese government's limits on official data, the group found that in 2022, there were at least 102 sentences handed down and over 1,200 people on death row in the country.
"The death penalty in Vietnam is used to intimidate those who would break the law, while also showing the power of the ruling party," Human Rights Watch's Asia deputy director Phil Robertson toldCNN in 2022. "This is a government that chases down dissidents, runs roughshod over civil society, sentences and imprisons people after kangaroo court trials, and now we know, executes far more people than anyone else in [the region]."
"Vietnam's horrendous record of executions dwarfs that of any of its neighbors but it is not surprising that the government has systematically implemented the death penalty and kept executions out of the public eye," Robertson added.
As the BCC noted:
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended.
The trials were part of the ongoing "Blazing Furnace" anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by Nguyễn Phú Trọng, secretary-general of Vietnam's Communist Party.
Multiple top officials have left office during the campaign, including Vietnamese President Võ Văn Thưởng, who resigned last month. The Communist Party did not offer details about the reason for his departure but said that "Thưởng's violations and shortcomings have caused bad public opinion, affecting the reputation of the party, the state, and him personally."
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US Tax Day Campaign Urges Congress to Stop Arming Israel's Genocide in Gaza
"This scale of devastation is only possible because of financial, political, and military support from the United States," said one Quaker campaigner.
Apr 11, 2024
With the April 15 U.S. federal income tax filing deadline just around the corner, the American Friends Service Committee on Thursday announced a Tax Day campaign to demand members of Congress stop funding Israel's genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.
AFSC—a Quaker group that has been active in Gaza since the Nakba, or Israeli ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine in 1948—said it seeks to highlight how U.S. taxpayer dollars "are misused to fund war and militarism instead of life-sustaining programs."
This year, the group's focus is on U.S. military aid to Israel amid the ongoing Gaza genocide, in which at least 109,500 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces, often using weapons supplied by Washington—including 2,000-pound bombs that can level entire city blocks. The majority of Palestinians killed during the war have been women and children, including more than 13,000 minors.
According to AFSC:
Over the last six months, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed using weapons provided by the United States. Humanitarian aid workers delivering vital assistance continue to be attacked and killed at unprecedented rates. The blockade and killing of humanitarian aid workers are causing widespread famine and starvation in Gaza.
"This scale of devastation is only possible because of financial, political, and military support from the United States," Jennifer Bing, who heads the AFSC's Palestine Activism Program, said in a statement. "We need our members of Congress to listen to their constituents and their conscience and say no to any additional military funding for Israel and yes to a cease-fire and humanitarian access."
AFSC general secretary Joyce Ajlouny said: "The U.S. government is deeply complicit in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children and families. Our tax dollars are buying the bombs dropping on their loved ones and the tanks that are destroying their cities."
"As a Quaker and a Palestinian I know that this violence will never bring peace," Ajlouny added. "We need an immediate cease-fire, an end to military funding from the U.S., and a political process that will end the apartheid system and bring true peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians."
The U.S., which already gave Israel around $4 billion in annual military aid before the October 7 attacks, has approved more than 100 arms shipments to the key Middle Eastern ally over the past six months. President Joe Biden—who since October 7 has repeatedly circumvented Congress in order to expedite weapons transfers to Israel—is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance to the country.
This, despite multiple domestic laws and the Biden administration's own rules barring arms transfers to countries that violate human rights.
Israel imports nearly 70% of its arms from the United States. Common Dreamsreported earlier this month that the Biden administration is pushing Congress to approve the sale of $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
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Sierra Club Urges Dem Senators to Uphold Biden Clean Vehicle Standards
One campaigner from the green group decried the "dangerous attempt to roll back progress on climate, clean air, and cleaner cars" by some lawmakers skeptical of the new EPA rules.
Apr 11, 2024
The Sierra Club on Wednesday launched a multistate digital ad campaign aimed at persuading seven U.S. senators—six of them Democrats—to back the Biden administration's already weakened tailpipe pollution standards for passenger cars and light-duty trucks.
The new campaign targets Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Az.), John Tester (D-Mt.), and Mark Warner (D-Va.), who have been critical of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recently finalized federal clean vehicle standards.
"The Sierra Club urges all senators to protect their constituents from toxic vehicle pollution and support these clean car standards that will save families money and give car buyers more choice," Will Anderson, the green group's deputy legislative director, said in a statement.
"The popular clean car standards are the latest commonsense action by the Environmental Protection Agency to tackle our nation's most polluting sector—transportation—and they work," Anderson added. "Trying to undo them is a dangerous attempt to roll back progress on climate, clean air, and cleaner cars that will benefit communities across the country."
Some of the ads are custom-tailored to individual lawmakers. Responding to Fetterman's recent criticism of the new EPA rules, one of the videos argues that "repealing this standard would harm Pennsylvania's growing clean energy economy, undermine efforts to clean up our air, and hurt children and seniors with asthma and other respiratory problems."
"We urge Sen. Fetterman to protect Pennsylvania families who will benefit from this lifesaving standard that will create jobs and give car buyers more options—not Big Polluters and their Republican allies who want to roll back climate progress," the video adds.
The EPA estimates that the new standards will prevent 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and provide $13 billion in annualized net benefits for consumers and the climate. While some environmentalists have hailed the new rules as the strongest ever of their kind, others argue they don't go far enough.
Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, last month claimed that "the EPA caved to pressure from Big Auto, Big Oil, and car dealers and riddled the plan with loopholes big enough to drive a Ford F-150 through."
The new Sierra Club campaign launched the day after a federal appellate panel upheld the Biden administration's 2022 decision to preserve California's strict vehicle emission standards, which have been adopted by 17 states and the District of Columbia. California's mandate is more stringent than the new EPA standards, which set no quotas for zero-emission vehicle sales.
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