May, 07 2021, 12:00am EDT
Sudan Debt Relief Moves Forward
U.S. plays major role in Sudan relief effort.
WASHINGTON
Under a debt relief plan won by advocates in the early 2000s, Sudan could see a drastic cut in its $50 billion debt this summer, according to the IMF and the World Bank.
"Sudan's debts would be cut by 85% under the debt relief plan," said Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of the religious development group Jubilee USA Network, which was a major force for the creation of the debt reduction process. "Debt relief cannot come soon enough for Sudan as the country struggles with the pandemic and a 50% poverty rate."
Thirty-seven, out of thirty-nine eligible countries, received debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative or HIPC. In order for Sudan to receive a debt reduction it must meet IMF economic reforms and clear missed debt payments. The United States loaned $1.1 billion to Sudan to clear debt payment arrears to the World Bank and convened creditors to secure debt relief.
"The United States is an important leader in Sudan debt relief and is playing a crucial role in expanding debt relief policies during the pandemic," shared LeCompte, who worked with Republican and Democratic administrations for more than a decade on debt policies. "This relief for Sudan can support economic growth and stabilize a hard-won peace in a country where conflict raged for 17 years."
After Sudan obtains debt relief, Eritrea remains the lone country that could qualify under the HIPC debt relief plan won by Jubilee USA.
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
Right-Wing Think Tank Finds Trump Plans Would Wreck Social Security
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign proposals "would dramatically worsen Social Security's finances."
Oct 21, 2024
Republican nominee Donald Trump's claim that he wants to "fight for and protect Social Security" was called into further question Monday after a conservative think tank released an analysis projecting that the former president's economic proposals and mass deportation plan would significantly damage the New Deal program's finances.
The new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) specifically focuses on Trump's proposals to end taxes on tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime pay; implement sweeping tariffs on imports; and launch what he's described as the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history."
The think tank projected that, if enacted, Trump's agenda would "increase Social Security's 10-year cash shortfall by $2.3 trillionthrough FY 2035" and "lead to a 33% across-the-board benefit cut in 2035, up from the 23% [the Congressional Budget Office] projects under current law."
Trump's plans would also "increase Social Security's annual shortfall by roughly 50% in FY 2035" and "advance insolvency by three years, from FY 2034 to FY 2031."
"Trump has said he would close Social Security's long-term shortfall by increasing drilling for oil and natural gas and by growing the economy," the analysis notes. "However, we've shown that increased energy exploration is unlikely to have a meaningful effect on Social Security—even if the gains were deposited into the trust fund. We've also shown that it would require unrealistically fast economic growth to close Social Security's existing long-term funding gap."
Social Security Works (SSW), a progressive advocacy group that supports expanding the New Deal program, highlighted CRFB's analysis in a social media post on Monday, writing, "Donald Trump plans to slash $2.3 TRILLION from Social Security while giving massive tax handouts to Wall Street billionaires." (The Social Security Works Political Action Committee has endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for the presidency.)
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare—which endorsed Harris in July—said it is "not surprising that Donald Trump's ill-conceived plans would devastate the financial health of Social Security and lead to huge benefit cuts."
"Trump's plans are of a piece with his overall recklessness with Social Security. He suspended the payroll tax that funds the program during Covid—and hoped it would be eliminated," said Richtman. "His White House budgets would have slashed Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) by billions of dollars. He said earlier this year that he was 'open' to 'cutting entitlements,' then tried to walk it back. He once called Social Security a 'Ponzi Scheme.' Time and again, Trump has chosen political expediency without considering—or caring about—the consequences. Despite his posturing, Donald Trump is no friend to Social Security or American seniors."
In a footnote of its analysis, CRFB states that Harris' proposals thus far "would not have large effects on Social Security trust fund solvency."
The Harris campaign quickly seized on CRFB's findings. Joseph Costello, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said in a statement Monday that "Donald Trump's agenda poses an imminent threat to Social Security, and seniors could have their benefits cut by a third."
"This is yet another reason that Americans simply cannot afford the risk of another Trump term, where he would pursue unchecked power to use his Project 2025 agenda to hurt the American people," said Costello. "Vice President Harris is committed to protecting Social Security benefits and is the only candidate who will actually fight for seniors, not just pay them lip service on the campaign trail."
According to the latest report from Social Security's Board of Trustees, the program is currently positioned to fully pay all benefits and administrative costs until 2035. Thereafter, even if Congress does nothing to shore up the program, it would be able to pay 83% of scheduled benefits.
To bring in more revenue and ensure Social Security's solvency through the end of the century, progressives in Congress have called for raising or scrapping the payroll tax cap, which allows the rich to stop contributing to the program just weeks into each year while ordinary Americans pay in year-round.
The Harris campaign has broadly signaled support for that approach, saying in its economic policy platform that the Democratic nominee would "shore up Social Security and Medicare so that these essential programs will stay solvent in the long run by making corporations and the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share in taxes."
This story has been updated to include comment from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Billionaire Investors Are 'Supercharging' Housing Crisis: Report
"Billionaires see housing as a way to boost their bottom line, instead of a necessity to survive."
Oct 21, 2024
A new report out Monday puts "into numbers the trend that ordinary Americans have known to be true for years," said economic justice advocates behind the analysis: "Their everyday struggles of affording a home are made worse by the sweeping influence that billionaires have over the market."
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) joined Popular Democracy in compiling a 71-page report titledBillionaire Blowback on Housing, aiming to get to the bottom of growing concerns in recent years about how Wall Street, as Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said earlier this month, is "buying up housing and making them less affordable."
The two groups found that a small number of wealthy individuals and their investment arms, who control "huge pools of wealth," have spent some of their vast resources on "predatory investment and wealth-parking in luxury housing"—contributing significantly to the crises of unaffordable rents, out-of-reach homeownership, and homelessness.
Billionaires are "supercharging existing problems" in the housing market, according to the report.
The authors take issue with assumptions about what is driving the housing crisis, which is characterized by record-breaking homelessness in 2023 with more than 653,000 people unhoused; half of tenants paying more than 30% of their income on rent, making them cost-burdened; and a significantly widened gap between the income needed to buy a house and the actual cost of a home.
"The real estate industry would like you to believe the problem is entirely one based on supply and demand," and that regulations need to be changed to allow for the construction of more affordable housing, reads the report. But with 16 million vacant homes across the U.S.—28 for every unhoused person—"the reality is that the owners of concentrated wealth... are playing a more pronounced role in residential housing, thereby creating price inflation, distortions, and inefficiencies in the market."
Signifying the U.S. real estate market's "emerging status as global tax haven," the number of vacant units in some communities exceed the number of unhoused people partially because wealthy investors are acquiring property and intentionally leaving it vacant, found IPS and Popular Democracy.
"The reality is that the owners of concentrated wealth... are playing a more pronounced role in residential housing, thereby creating price inflation, distortions, and inefficiencies in the market."
For example, in 2017 there were more than 93,500 vacant units in Los Angeles and an estimated 36,000 unhoused residents, with vacancies treated as "a structural feature of the market thanks to the presence of a small class of wealthy investors who engage in speculative financial behavior."
Billionaires and their investment firms, such as Blackstone—now the world's largest corporate landlord—are also "taking advantage of the tight low-income rental market, lack of publicly funded affordable housing, displacement after the foreclosure crisis, and inaccessible homeownership to get into the business of single-family and multifamily home rentals, and buying up mobile home parks," the report reads.
In one section of North Minneapolis, private equity firms including Pretium Partners "snatched up blocks of single-family rental homes, added fees on top of rent, and then proceeded to neglect the maintenance and upkeep of their properties."
Blackstone now owns 300,000 residential units across the U.S. and nearly doubled its portfolio in 2021. With $1 trillion in assets, it owns 63,000 single-family homes, 149,000 apartment units, and 70 mobile home parks.
Corporate ownership of rental housing stock "has not translated into housing stability, particularly for working-class households and communities of color," reads the report. "Rather, corporate landlords have concentrated their predatory investment practices—flipping, rent gouging, habitability violations, and evictions—in lower-income communities of color."
The billionaire class and its private equity firms, said Chuck Collins, co-author of the report and director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, has "severely disrupted" the housing market.
"This is not your grandparent's gentrification—but a hyper-gentrification fueled by concentrated wealth driving up land and housing costs, expanding short-term rentals, and treating housing like a commodity to speculate on or a place to park wealth," said Collins. "The billionaires are displacing the millionaires, and the millionaires are disrupting the housing market for everyone else."
The report calls on policymakers to expand social housing—housing developed by the government or a not-for-profit entity to ensure individuals, households, and families are guaranteed housing as a human right, which cannot be sold for profit.
Social housing could be paid for by levying mansion taxes, regulating predatory practices in the real estate market, and taxing billionaires.
Local communities can also protect residents and generate revenue for affordable housing through actions including:
- Establishing "Housing First" programs to rapidly provide permanently affordable housing to the unhoused and end the criminalization of homelessness;
- Limiting corporate ownership of housing and passing laws requiring ownership transparency so corporations can no longer secretly buy up neighborhoods;
- Passing ordinances giving apartment and mobile home tenants the "first option to buy" when their communities come up for sale;
- Prohibiting owners from keeping units vacant for long periods of time; and
- Creating local Offices of Social Housing and Social Housing Development Authorities to function as supportive infrastructure, with the input of tenant unions, unhoused people's organizations, and other impacted community members.
"Billionaires see housing as a way to boost their bottom line, instead of a necessity to survive. This current system doesn't serve our communities," said Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper, co-executive directors for Popular Democracy. "We need to do better. That starts with re-shaping our systems to look out for the needs and desires of working families, instead of billionaire investment and speculation. We need to safeguard renters' rights, and drastically expand the availability of permanently and truly affordable quality housing."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Conquer, Kick Out, Resettle': Israel's Far-Right Gathers to Plan Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
"Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza," said one prominent Israeli settler.
Oct 21, 2024
Hundreds of Israelis including numerous senior state officials gathered Sunday near the Gaza border for a festive two-day rally at which members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and leaders of the settler movement openly spoke of ethnically cleansing Palestinians in the embattled coastal enclave to make way for Jewish recolonization.
"We came here with one clear purpose: to settle the entire Gaza Strip... Every inch from north to south," Daniella Weiss, who co-founded the extremist settler movement Nachala—which organized the rally backed by Netanyahu's Likud party—told attendees on Monday as joyous music played in the background.
"We're thousands of people and ready to move to Gaza at a moment's notice," she continued. "October 7 changed history. As a result of the brutal massacre, the Gazan Arabs have lost their rights to be here forever, they'll not stay here."
"We plan to take what we have acquired in the years of settling Judea and Samaria and to do the same thing here in Gaza," Weiss asserted, referring to the historic Jewish names for the illegally occupied Palestinian West Bank territories being gradually usurped by Israeli seizure and settlement. "Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza."
"I want to say to the world: This isn't just for the Jews. We're doing this for the benefit of the entire world," added Weiss, who earlier this year was sanctioned by Canada for inciting violence against Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank. "Ending the evil powers is for everyone. I call on the democracies of the world to stand with us. Adopt the values of the Bible."
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, told attendees: "What we have learned this year is that everything is up to us. We are the owners of this land."
"Yes, we experienced a terrible catastrophe," he added. "But what we need to understand, one year later—so many Israelis have changed their thinking... They understand that when Israel acts like the rightful owners of this land, this is what brings results."
May Golan, Minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel, told rallygoers, "We will hit them where it hurts—their land."
"Anyone who uses their plot of land to plan another Holocaust will receive from us, with God's help, another Nakba," Golan added, referring to the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine by Jewish militants during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Around two-thirds of Gaza's population are descendants of Nakba refugees.
Sima Hasson of the group Mothers' Parade told the audience that "I'm going to say something that not everyone here is prepared to say, but I am, and I know a lot of you are: Conquer, kick out, resettle."
"I'm not just talking about one area of Gaza," she continued. "I'm not just talking about northern Gaza. I mean every single sliver of land. It's the only way we'll save our boys from constantly going to war."
"To everyone in Europe who has an opinion about what's happening here, I say: Don't get involved," Hasson added. "Worry about yourselves. Radical Islam is taking over your whole continent. You want to help? Take in the Gazans who we want to leave Gaza."
Other Cabinet members who spoke at the rally included Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party and Negev and Galilee Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf of Jewish Power. Knesset members in attendance included Ariel Kallner, Avichai Boaron, Osher Shkalim, Tally Gotliv, and Sasson Gueta of Likud; Tzvi Sukkot of the Religious Zionist Party; and Limor Son Harmelech from Jewish Power.
"We need to occupy the complete land of Israel. There are no innocent people in Gaza," Gotliv toldMiddle East Eye. "Everybody who has refused to leave the north is a collaborator."
"There are no innocent people in Gaza."
While numerous Israeli officials called for the recolonization of a Gaza Strip prior to the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, such calls have accelerated since then. In January, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other senior Israeli officials attended a similar but smaller conference hosted by Nachala on the Jewish recolonization of Gaza.
Last year, Amir Weitmann, who chairs Likud's Libertarian faction, published a plan examining the economics of forcibly transferring Gazans to Egypt's Sinai Desert. A separate 2023 proposal by then-Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, who is also a Likud member, would ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, forcing them into the Sinai.
Monday's rally came as Israel's military continued its relentless 381-day assault on Gaza, which has left more than 152,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and for which Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In recent weeks, Israeli forces have intensified attacks on northern Gaza—seen by numerous observers as the part of the coastal strip most likely to be seized by Israel—including Saturday airstrikes in Beit Lahia in which more than 120 Palestinians were killed, wounded, or are missing.
The intensified assault comes as some Israeli troops claim the Israel Defense Forces has launched the so-called "Generals' Plan," a blueprint for the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza. The U.S., which provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover, last week warned Israeli leaders against any such "policy of starvation," which critics countered is already being implemented throughout Gaza with deadly results.
More than 20 Israeli settlements were built in Gaza following Israel's conquest of the territory during the 1967 Six-Day War. While Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the besieged enclave is still considered occupied under international law, as Israel maintains a physical and economic stranglehold on the territory.
As in the occupied West Bank, Israel's settlements in Gaza, as well as the occupation itself, were illegal under international law. In July, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion stating that Israel's 57-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must end "as rapidly as possible."
However, in language resembling the Palestinian liberation slogan "from the river to the sea," Likud's founding platform states that "between the sea and the Jordan [River], there will be only Israeli sovereignty." On multiple occasions over the past year or so, Netanyahu has publicly displayed maps showing the Middle East in which there is no Palestine and all Palestinian lands are labeled as "Israel."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular