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For Immediate Release
February, 03 2021, 11:00pm EDT
Contact:
Paul Kawika Martin, Peace Action, 951-217-7285, pmartin@peace-action.org
Biden-Harris End Support of Yemen War; NGOs Demand End to All Arms Sales and Increased Humanitarian Aid
Ahead of the Biden-Harris announcement to end U.S. support for the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen, Paul Kawika Martin, Senior Director for Policy and Political Affairs at Peace Action, released the following statement:
"It's about time that the U.S. end all complicity in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen with at least 100,000 dead and tens of millions on the brink of starvation. We welcome the Biden-Harris administration's announcement today but want to make sure the details include stopping all support and blocking all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
WASHINGTON
Ahead of the Biden-Harris announcement to end U.S. support for the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen, Paul Kawika Martin, Senior Director for Policy and Political Affairs at Peace Action, released the following statement:
"It's about time that the U.S. end all complicity in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen with at least 100,000 dead and tens of millions on the brink of starvation. We welcome the Biden-Harris administration's announcement today but want to make sure the details include stopping all support and blocking all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
"Millions of activists around the world, including Peace Action supporters and affiliates, pushed for countries to stop aiding this horrific war. Led by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and others, Congress historically passed war powers legislation to halt U.S. complicity and to thwart arms sales only for Trump to callously veto the measures. Cancelling the sale of precision guided weapons is particularly needed because Saudi Arabia used them to target civilians.
"The announced U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen can push Saudi Arabia and the UAE to change its conduct and negotiate in good faith to end their war on Yemen and allow humanitarian aid to flow."
Peace Action is the United States' largest peace and disarmament organization with over 100,000 members and nearly 100 chapters in 34 states, works to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons, promote government spending priorities that support human needs and encourage real security through international cooperation and human rights.
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'Her Charade Is Over': Platner Slams Collins for Skipping Abortion Hearings Since Roe Reversal
The Maine Republican was a decisive vote for Brett Kavanaugh, "and in the years since Roe was overturned, Susan Collins has done everything she can to skirt responsibility and avoid accountability," said the Democrat.
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As part of Graham Platner's campaign to oust Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, the Democrat on Friday called out the five-term senator for skipping committee hearings on reproductive healthcare, including abortion, since the US Supreme Court that she helped build overturned Roe v. Wade.
Reproductive freedom advocates across Maine have renewed efforts to replace Collins since she voted to confirm various anti-choice judicial nominees during President Donald Trump's first term, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of sexual assault, in 2018.
Kavanaugh is part of the far-right supermajority that reversed Roe with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision in 2022, which led to a fresh wave of state-level restrictions on reproductive healthcare.
Beacon, run by the Maine People's Alliance, reported Friday that since the Dobbs ruling, Collins has not attended any Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee "meetings focused on abortion or reproductive healthcare," according to the panel's hearing reports.
They included the July 2022 hearing titled "Reproductive Care in a Post-Roe America: Barriers, Challenges, and Threats to Women's Health" and the June 2024 hearing titled "The Assault on Women’s Freedoms: How Abortion Bans Have Created a Healthcare Nightmare Across America."
More broadly, the Beacon noted, "Collins has also missed more than half of all possible HELP Committee meetings during her current term. Between 2021 and March 2026, she did not attend 67 of 125 possible HELP Committee and relevant subcommittee hearings."
Since launching his campaign last year, Platner has repeatedly called out Collins for demonstrating "symbolic opposition" to Trump while enabling his agenda and serving the interests of wealthy donors instead of working people. The combat veteran and oyster farmer—who's now the presumptive Democratic nominee after Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the primary race last month—similarly took aim at his opponent in response to the new reporting.
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' decision to wade into the tax the rich debate raised eyebrows Thursday, as progressives who have long demanded a wealth tax for billionaires said they'd be happy to include him in the ongoing discussion about how the US tax system can be reformed to benefit working people.
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Critics of Bezos were quick to point out this week that the 1% effective tax rate the billionaire paid between 2014-18 was due to his avoidance of the income tax that working Americans have to pay, with the executive "offsetting earned income with other investment losses and various deductions."
Progressive leaders like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have argued that billionaires including Bezos pay a lower effective tax rate than working people because a vast amount of their wealth comes from unrealized capital gains and other investments instead of income from labor.
Bezos has also not faced a tax on his immense overall wealth of $275.4 billion, which US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives have long called for, saying that taxing a relatively tiny amount of the assets held by billionaires like Bezos, Tesla founder and President Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk, and other tech and business executives could fund essential services for the rest of society—including many that have contributed to the affordability crisis for working families.
"Let's have that debate" regarding reforms to the US tax system, Sanders said Thursday evening, addressing Bezos on Musk's platform X.
The senator has proposed a 5% annual wealth tax, which he said would leave Bezos still sitting on $269 billion in total wealth, while providing enough revenue to fund guaranteed universal childcare, an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for senior citizens, a nationwide starting salary of $60,000 per year for public school teachers, and more.
In his interview with CNBC and on social media this week, Bezos repeatedly attempted to shift attention away from his taxes and onto the income taxes paid by the bottom 50% of earners, claiming that the "top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes."
"The United States has the most progressive tax system in the world," he asserted. "We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group."
Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, who has also called for a wealth tax and last month co-authored a Guardian op-ed with Mamdani explaining how the regressive tax system of the US has helped ensure the top 0.0001% of the global population holds the equivalent of 16% of the world's wealth, said Bezos was misrepresenting the conclusions of global economists regarding the US system.
"Your claim that the top 1% pays 40% of taxes and the bottom 50% only 3% is misleading: It captures just one tax—the federal income tax—and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive," said Zucman.
Bezos continued debating the issue on social media on Wednesday, sharing an article that explained how numerous analyses have determined he has paid an effective tax rate hovering around 1%.
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At Newsweek on Wednesday, the magazine's editors wrote that Bezos was correct in his CNBC interview that "one billionaire's larger tax bill will not fund a modern state by itself."
"The deeper issue is whether the tax system asks comparable civic seriousness from wages, capital gains, inheritances, consumption, and payroll," wrote the editors. "A nurse's paycheck is easy to tax because it is visible. A billionaire's wealth can grow through assets that may remain untaxed until sale, or perhaps sheltered safely in some offshore domain."
"The political danger in Bezos’ argument" to allow the bottom 50% of American earners to pay nothing in income tax, the editors added, "is that it lets billionaires sound generous while leaving the structure of wealth largely untouched."
Thom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report said Bezos' push to eliminate income taxes for a huge swath of Americans benefits him and other billionaires in three ways, while ultimately harming those he claims to be trying to help save money:
First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since [former President Ronald] Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.
Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”
If we just got rid of—or privatized/profitized—all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.
Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.
Hartmann highlighted Bezos' resistance to a wealth tax and a fair tax rate with an anecdote about "a very wealthy German businessman" he once saw interviewed by an American reporter on Bloomberg News.
The businessman asked the reporter "how he could possibly live in a country" that taxes "very wealthy and successful people" at about 60%.
"Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country."
In contrast, Hartmann wrote, "the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks."
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